1. Technical Field
The embodiments described herein relate to a semiconductor memory apparatus and, more particularly, to a pre-fetch circuit of a semiconductor memory apparatus and a control method of the same.
2. Related Art
Generally, a test equipment of a semiconductor memory apparatus can be classified into high-frequency channels, which are capable of supporting high-frequency signal processing, and low-frequency channels, which are not capable of supporting such the high-frequency signal processing.
The number of the high-frequency channels is far smaller than that of the low-frequency channels and most high-speed semiconductor memory apparatus are tested using the high-frequency channels.
The semiconductor memory apparatus uses a pre-fetch operation as a data processing method. In the case of a semiconductor memory apparatus using the pre-fetch operation, high-frequency channels are used for high-speed data processing in test equipment.
As shown in FIG. 1, a conventional pre-fetch circuit of a semiconductor memory apparatus includes a pre-fetch unit 10 and first to fourth registers 20 to 50.
Referring to FIG. 2, the pre-fetch unit 10 produces output data by pre-fetching input data on a four-bit unit basis in response to a DQ strobe signal “WDQS.”
The first to fourth registers 20 to 50 respectively latch the pre-fetched four-bit data dinev0, dinod0, dinev1 and dinod1 according to data input strobe signal “dinstb” and then output the latched data to global data lines WGIOev0, WGIOod0, WGIOev1 and WGIOod1 which are respectively connected to them.
The conventional semiconductor memory apparatus has to use the high-frequency channels of the channels, which are provided to the test equipment at the time of testing the high-speed data processing, but the number of the high-frequency channels is smaller than that of the low-frequency channels.
Accordingly, the number of semiconductor memory apparatuses which can be test at once is limited to the number of the high-frequency channels provided by the test equipment and this limit in number causes a problem in that the testing efficiency is lowered.